Page 49 of Grim and Oro
“Clearly.” I consider this situation. Both of us here, in her lands. “I suppose I could have allowed you to stay at my palace. Let you heal there.”
I shouldn’t have made her leave. I have a fierce desire to keep her where I can see her, where I can make sure she’s safe.
For the sword, of course.
Her rush of distaste surprises me. “I hate your palace,” she says.
Does she? “Why?”
“Besides the fact that you live there?” That almost makes me smile. No one else would dare speak to me that way. Only this cursed hearteater would have the gall. “There’s no color. It’s so ... dark. I could never live in a place like that.”
Color. Huh. I’ve never noticed. Perhaps that’s why she seems so out of place. This shining, bright spring of life in my dark castle.
Her words hurt me more than they should.
“You know,” she says, already moving on, oblivious to my own thoughts, “my guardians closed my window because of you.”
I raise a questioning brow at her, even though I’m very much aware. A flare of anger ignites in my chest at the memory. That guardian of hers should thank the stars every day that I still haven’t killed her.
“There was ... a loose pane. You saw it when we dueled. It was the only way I could sneak out. I had to tell them about it, to explain my ankle injury.”
I can feel the pain, separate from her wound. It’s clear the window meant a lot to her.
“Can’t you use your portaling device to go outside?” I absolutely refuse to call it astarstick.
She’s suddenly ashamed. Shy. Her green eyes leave mine and find the floor. I have the urge to turn her chin up, to force her to look at me, but I stay very still. “I—I’m awful at traveling short distances with it. And I can only reliably go places I’ve been before.”
Ah. She hasn’t mastered its use.
I’m mentally transported to centuries before, when I had the same issue. When I had also been trapped in a room, desperate for a way out of it.
No ... this hearteater and I are not as different as I previously thought.
I remember, for a crushing moment, the helplessness I had felt in my room before discovering my flair. The loneliness.
She is the same, I realize.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words spilling out of me before I can think about how long it’s been I’ve uttered them. “About the window.”I really should have killed her guardian, I think. Before she could seal it. Before she couldhurther.
She asks me something that pulls me back into the present. “If you created my device, then how did it get to Wildling?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I say, and it’s the truth. Though, it’s not the full truth. That, she can’t know.
Panic.
“Did you ... did you know my mother?”
I frown. “No. I haven’t met another Wildling since the curses.”
Relief.
We watch each other. I wait to feel another emotion, to get another clue to what’s happening inside of her mind, but all she does is watch me back, with the same fascination.
What could she find so fascinating about me?
No one has held my gaze for this long before. No one has dared. I can feel her emotions shifting. She’s starting to become all too conscious of our positions. Her, in bed, in barely any clothing. Me, sitting here, watching her, from just a few feet away.
“Do you always play with your hair when you’re uncomfortable?” I ask.
